ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
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Nuclear Technology
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Volkan Seker, Haining Zhou, Thomas J. Downar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 6 | June 2020 | Pages 805-824
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1703464
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Transient Reactor Test Facility (TREAT) was designed in the late 1950s to test nuclear fuels and materials under extreme conditions and has been recently restarted by the U.S. Department of Energy to provide the transient test capability to evaluate the performance of innovative nuclear fuels under accident conditions. Benchmark experiment data are required to support the operation of TREAT and to validate the computational analyses necessary to design and evaluate the experiments. Therefore, in this paper, benchmark problems based on the minimum critical (MC) core and M8 Power Calibration Experiment (M8CAL) core of TREAT were developed and analyzed using the Monte Carlo code Serpent. The eigenvalue, temperature coefficient, and flux distributions for both the MC core and the M8CAL cores were calculated and compared to the experimental data. All the calculated values compared well to the experimental data, and both problems were subsequently approved as International Reactor Physics Experiment Evaluation Project benchmarks.
